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Installing the proprietary ATI AMD Catalyst driver is a bit tricky under Fedora 22 because the currently available driver, identified as “revision 15.5” on their website, but actually versioned 15.101.1001 as far at the fglrx driver version is concerned, is just not compatible with the Xorg version of Fedora 22. Driver will install fine, but you’ll get a nice black screen on reboot.

One working solution would be to downgrade Xorg packages to Fedora 21 versions, waiting for AMD to release a compatible version of their driver, if they ever do. If you want to go down that route, there’s a good blog entry here that explains quite well how to do so.

However, I didn’t want to downgrade to the Fedora 21 Xorg version, so I managed to find another way. The previous version of the driver I had (14.501.1003) didn’t work with this Xorg version either. However, a somewhat difficult to find, intermediary version of the driver, internally versioned as 15.20.1013, apparently dated from February 2015 (whereas the latest, non-working version is dated April 2015), does actually work with the newer Xorg version. Go figure. As a quick summary:

Internal version

Internal release date

Complete version string

Revision (website)

Works with Fedora 22 ?

14.501.1003

2014-11-20

S14.501.1003-141120a-178002C

14.x

No, Xorg version not supported

15.20.1013

2015-02-27

S15.20.1013-150227a-180955E-ATI

15.3 (?)

Yes

15.101.1001

2015-04-14

S15.101.1001-150414a-184705C

15.5

No, black screen (regression?)

By the way, to find out the real fglrx version and real release date of an fglrx driver, you can look in the amdpcsdb.default file of the unpacked archive :

On this complete release version numbering scheme, we can guess that the first part is the fglrx version (e.g. 15.20.1013), the second part is the release date (e.g. 15-02-27), and the third part seems to be a forever incrementing number, probably something like an internal SVN revision (180955). Note that the revision number advertised on their website (15.5 for the most recent version) is nowhere to be found in the archive file.

Back to our problem: the only package I could find for 15.20.1013 is buried deep on Launchpad, it’s labeled 15.200 there (seriously, what the hell AMD with your version numbering?), but it actually is 15.20.1013. Unfortunately, once unpacked, it doesn’t have the usual fglrx installer directory layout, and it’s missing the usual install scripts. It’s not usable out of the box.

What I did was unpacking it, along with the most recent 15.101.1001 package in another directory. Then, I replaced all the libraries and driver components of the 15.101.1001 installer by the 15.20.1013 versions. This way, I have an usable fglrx installer for 15.20.1013. This operation is not very difficult to do, but a bit cumbersome, if you don’t want to bother doing it yourself, jou can grab the resulting archive, and skip over the next section.

Building a working installer for fglrx 15.20.1013

Steps to do it yourself : Grab the release 15.5 aka fglrx 15.101.1001 (mirror) Grab the tar.gz of fglrx 15.20.1013 (mirror) Grab this patch to make the driver compatible with kernel 4.0+ Grab this other patch to help the installer properly detecting your Xorg version with the new rootless X Fedora installations Then fire up you preferred terminal